Abstract
Regarding the sustainable development goals (SDGs) formulated by the United Nations (UN), how to effectively measure, assess and compare the progress and trends of these SDGs in different countries was the problem we wanted to address. Based on past quantitative assessments, this paper proposed a new methodological framework for SDG assessment and analysis, and used two typical Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as the sample area to test the framework. Our study chose 209 indicators and indicator sets, including 429 specific indicators and collected relevant indicator data for the two countries from 2000 to 2017, then proposed a new direction for the unification of indicator data as well as methods for normalization. Afterward, the scores of each goal and SDG performance were calculated. This analysis was also done innovatively using the Chow Test to conduct further analysis of the SDG performance. According to the assessment, over those 18 years, Kyrgyzstan’s SDGs had been performing poorly, especially the economic SDGs, while the performance of Kazakhstan’s SDGs had remained in constant fluctuation. It could be said that the SDG performance in Central Asia as a whole was not very optimistic. It required the devotion of greater efforts in the gathering of different types of indicator data because there were still gaps in data collection between countries as well as the missing of time-series data, which could challenge the indicator selection and further restrict the follow-up assessment and analysis. The assessment framework presented in this paper can be applied for assessing the long-term performance of national SDGs of different countries, helping analyze the internal relationship dynamic among and within countries, underscoring specific issues of sustainable development, assessing policy and selecting development models and directions.
Highlights
Over the past 20 years, there has been a substantial increase in methods and indices for measuring sustainable development
This paper used two typical Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as the sample area to test whether this methodological framework could realize the comprehensive assessment over the country’s long-term performance and trends for SDGs
In terms of social SDG performance, it was evident that Kazakhstan performed better than Kyrgyzstan after 2013
Summary
Over the past 20 years, there has been a substantial increase in methods and indices for measuring sustainable development. Recent indicator-based assessments and reports of sustainable development can provide an SDG assessment analysis report with useful case studies, such as providing ways for selecting the indicators or a range of different approaches or quantitative methods like the study of Zhang [12] and Guo et al [13] Based on those prevenient research and assessments of sustainable development, countries and organizations around the world have conducted a series of initial indicator-based assessments of SDGs at different scales, including assessments of baselines, trend analysis, and benchmarking of progress since 2016 [7,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31], though there were weaknesses and problems of these SDG assessments [32]. It was the first study that employed historical trend data and estimated the speed at which a country realizes SDGs and whether or not such speed could help that country accomplish their SDGs by 2030
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